Good Ones, Lost Ones
by inbox
Summary: Ten years after Arcade Gannon fled the Mojave in disgrace, he has a chance meeting with Craig Boone. Fourth part of the 'Take Your Shot' series, originally written for the Fallout Kink Meme.
1. Chapter 1

The bar was packed with people, a seething heaving mass of humanity sweating and shouting and moving in eddies and swirls of crushing, cloying contact. Every few minutes someone shoves someone else, someone shouts, some threatens to take it outside. It was loud, hot and cramped, the air stale and damp, reeking of cigarettes and sweat and a hundred humans moving in close proximity

Arcade Gannon was enjoying himself immensely.

There wasn't much in the way of entertainment in New Canaan. There was a lovely church and an excellently maintained library and once you got past the walls of the city properly there was even a rather charming garden, cool even under the late August sun. Sightseeing and gardens tended to lose their appeal after the fourth straight day of visiting for even the most devoted fan, and considering that Arcade had been in New Canaan for two weeks now, he was beyond starved for human contact.

He'd made the executive decision to leave the quiet confines of the city gates once he found himself looking over the edge of his magazine and speculatively eyeing the jugs of clear spirit he'd ordered last week, realising that once a man started thinking about mixing a drink from surgical-grade alcohol he was either desperately bored or on the fast track to becoming a drunk with very expensive taste.

Someone bumped his elbow and wine splashed over the rim of his glass, rivulets of red dripping over his fingers. He bit back his first response to snap at the whip of a girl with a spray of freckles across her nose and a mark of a healer branded into her arm, instead accepting with good grace her offer of a replacement glass. Someone else cannoned into him and she rolled her eyes.

"You're not having much luck tonight, huh?"

His second assailant put his hands up in an apologetic gesture when Arcade pinned him with the kind of glare that makes schoolboys cringe and husbands shuffle their feet. There was a mumbled _sorry, sorry, didn't mean to make a thing of it_ and he could hear the tribal girl giggling at his elbow.

"Trust me, I rarely have a good run of luck at the best of times." He drained the dregs of his wine and waggled his glass in the universal motion for 'it's your shout'.

"I'm Katie," she shouted over the din after a tired-looking bartender finally delivered their drinks.

"John," he mouthed back, the assumed name tasting familiar and honest after so many years. Their glasses made a satisfying clink as she proposed a sardonic toast – _to overcrowded bars and personal space –_ and for the sake of anyone to talk to, they chatted to each other.

"So where are you from?" She stood in the lee of his bulk, avoiding the eye of a boisterous young shopboy who didn't seem to care all that much when Arcade had smoothly lied that she was his girlfriend. _Sorry_, he'd said wryly. _Either you're not the girl for me or I'm not a very convincing boyfriend_. She'd just covered her mouth and shook her head, amusement playing at the corners of her eyes.

"Great Plains. Way, way north." It's almost shameful how easy the lies tumble out these days. If only he'd learned the art of true deception years ago, he'd… well, he wouldn't be in possibly the only dive bar in Mormon territories killing an evening making conversation with a stranger.

"If you think Canaan is bad, imagine what the nights are like in a cow town. Moonshine and Brahmin tipping, oh my."

Katie laughed and swilled back the last of her drink. "I can imagine. My people grow corn. You don't know excitement until it's midwinter and there's nothing left to do but drink barely fermented mash. There's nothing like the chance of going blind to add a bit of excitement to a long night, I guess."

She glanced around the bar and indicated that he should lean down so she could tell him something.

"Look John, I don't know if you're into this at all - and you haven't tried a move on me all night, so I'm guessing you are - but there's a guy on the other side of the bar who keeps staring at you. Like, staring-staring."

Arcade snorted and resisted the urge to glance around. "Should I be flattered?"

There was a pause as she looked around his arm, then made a so-so motion. "You could do better. I think he's balding."

"Pass." He stood back up straight and pulled a face. "I'm too old and decrepit to turn my head for anything less than a seven out of ten."

She grinned and tapped her caps on the bar, not even bothering to humour him about the crack about his age and state of being. "I'll save you the risk of catching his eye by covering your round. I owe you, _boyfriend._"

He thanked her for her kindness and they fell back into small talk.

"So you're a healer? Are you here for supplies? If so you're going to be waiting for weeks; I've already been here for a fortnight and I'm still waiting on half my order to get to me."

He twirled the stem of his glass between his fingers before taking a long drink. He was right at that point where he knew he could either tip into relaxed merriment or slink away with a crippling headache, and like hell he'd spend the night chewing a strip of willow bark and feeling sorry for himself.

She shook her head. "Nothing like that. Waiting to join the next Followers group walking back west. I'd take one of the truck convoys but… caps are tight, y'know."

"Trust me, I know. No one has two caps to rub together lately. It's taken me six months to scrape together the money to travel here and I didn't have anything more than a dufflebag. So, uh, what are your plans west? Fame and fortune? Skip New Reno, the place is a dive." He was nervously bullying for information and he knew it but honestly didn't care. Despite the instantaneous flicker of nervousness just at her mention of the Followers of the Apocalypse he was more than keen to press for gossip and news - the past six years up in the wilds of Wyoming had starved him of information about what was happening in the civilised world, and god knew he was sick of news that only involved grain prices and who was wounded today and _John, it's calving season and we need you tonight_.

"I'm going to study at their university there. Have you heard of it?" If she noticed his barely repressed nervous twitch, she didn't mention it. "The Followers outta New Canaan have been visiting with teaching material and last time they said I'd studied enough to go and train for surgery. I had two days to pack my bags and get moving." She patted at the brand on her arm and smiled happily. "No more practising on dogs and tying bandages on field hands. I can't wait."

"It'll-" His throat felt thick and he immediately felt foolish for getting choked up about a school, and made a show of exclaiming that he'd swallowed his drink the wrong way. "-it'll be wonderful. A friend of mine studied there. Said it was one of the best times of his life."

Her eyes flicked to the small wooden rod of Asclepius hanging from his neck but mercifully didn't press the point. "And now? Still practising?"

"Still practising," he confirmed, fixing a smile to his face and trying to elevate his mood. It was a perfectly fine evening and he didn't want to ruin it just because some wounds still refused to knit together even after a decade of watching over his shoulder and seeing nothing but ghosts. "Still practising, still has the worst bedside manners."

Arcade cut the conversation short by flagging the bartender and ordering another round for himself and his new friend. He glanced around the crush of people bellied up to the bar but no one was watching him. He shook his head, chiding himself for feeling so rattled.

_There's a guy on the other side of the bar who keeps staring at you._

He thanked the bartender and turned around to pass Katie her terrible sweet agave concoction, twisting back to grab his own glass and interestedly scanning the crowd to find his mystery watcher.

Arcade knew he was playing with a very loaded deck just by being out here past the walls at night. Hell, he was taking a big risk just by travelling into New Canaan.

He'd stopped at the door of his cramped rented apartment only a few hours ago, mentally tallying the risks of someone, anyone, recognising him. NCR defectors, gossiping traders, Rangers seeking a night of rest before spearing ever eastward... someone might be carrying the wanted lists that still carried his name and description, eager to pick up the generous bounty he knew still hung over his head.

Then he'd shrugged and thought that ten years and the addition a nose repeatedly broken and badly reset, hair now more silver than gold, the kind of scruffy beard that would've caused Judah make all sorts of disapproving noises, so many small elements adding up to make him just different enough to look like someone else. That's what he'd hoped anyway, sighing before locking his door and setting out into the night.

_You're being paranoid_, he told himself, taking a sip of his wine and looking over the rim of his glass. _The chances are small. You told yourself that_.

Arcade Gannon, John Hansen. No matter what name he used, Arcade always had been awfully adept at proving himself catastrophically wrong.


	2. Chapter 2

If the whole situation wasn't the stuff of his worst dreams it might've been funny in a painful, black way. He was halfway through swallowing a mouthful of red wine when he accidentally caught the eye someone sitting half in shadow on the far side of the bar. He froze, the tannins of cheap wine from some godforsaken tribal vineyard in Oregon sticking in his throat right at the moment his brain frantically paged back through a lifetime of faces before serving up a name that he hadn't thought about in years.

Arcade always wondered what he'd do if this moment ever happened. Mostly he'd figured he'd melt away into a crowd and leave his assailant wondering where he'd gone, buying himself time to leave everything behind and run. If he had to fight, then he'd fight – he'd lived rough for a few years and learned enough about knives to be dangerous when cornered, and for quite a while he'd had no qualms about using the needle-sharp boning knife hanging from his belt to defend himself and his meagre belongings.

Now that the moment actually happened, it turned out that all he'd do was silently choke down a mouthful of wine as it threatened to cascade into his windpipe and then lock up on the spot like a startled Bighorner calf. The part where his feet felt nailed to the floor and his thought processes degenerated into a scared stream of _oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck_was novel though. Unique. Terrifying. Definitely not on his list of fun ways to pass the night.

He forced himself to take a deep shaky breath, and somewhere at the back of his senses he could hear Katie at his back, asking if he was all right. _Oh, I'm fine_, he thought, the taste of adrenaline like tin underneath his tongue. _Just experiencing the unique sensation of blinding fear and paranoia topped of with bilious nausea. You know how it is_. He didn't grace her with a real answer, shaking off her concerned hand as she tried to gently spin him around.

Across the bar, through the fug of smoke and still air, Craig Boone just stared back. Even after all this time Arcade could read his expression well enough to see the exact dawning moment when he, too, had matched a name to a face.

Arcade didn't know or care who moved first. Boone was sliding off his chair as Arcade slammed his glass onto the counter, spinning on his heel and surging into the crowd. He elbowed past Katie, knocking her drink to the floor and almost sending her off her feet. His first instinct was to apologise and make sure she was all right, but the white noise and tunnel vision of sheer panic left him calling _sorry, I'm so sorry, good luck with your studies_over his shoulder as he pushed his way through the scrum of people blocking the door.

He burst through the heavy door into the warm night air, skidding to a halt as he let pure epinephrine take over his actions. He took the steps two at a time, jumping the last few and stumbling as he landed heavily in the street, his worn boots dangerously slippery on the aged concrete. Despite the late hour the street was still full of people, the sensation of their collective stare feeling curiously like arrows in his back as he sprinted down the buckled swathe of broken road as fast as his legs could humanly carry him.

* * *

Arcade didn't know where he was running to, just that he wanted to be far, far away from the thud of running footsteps gaining on him. He swore as he stumbled on a grate, aware that he was horribly winded and starting to slow down. Boone had always been better at running, at chasing things and being a wolf when he needed to be. Hunter vs hunted.

The unbroken chain of _fuckohfuckohfuck_ started up in Arcade's head again, the refrain a childish distraction from the bright white pain of a stitch beginning to pick at his side.

Boone shouted his name and Arcade found a renewed source of strength, all his focus on the rapidly approaching gap of an alleyway. _Straight line speed vs sharp movements,_ he thought, and had a brief crisp image of waving his arms and chasing the milker yearlings away from the house as his neighbour doubled over with laughter. He silently promised he'd never make fun of living in a cow town ever again if he could just outpace Boone, slip back to his apartment and then fade away back to his small life. John Hansen wouldn't be running through the dirty outskirts of New Canaan with the threat of a firing squad at his always suspected that the John Hansen part of him was an infinitely better person than the Arcade Gannon side, and this final indignity was perhaps concrete proof of that suspicion.

_Why did I come here, why did I think it was safe, why do I have such poor impulse control, why is my judgement so bad, why did I take up smoking, why why why..._

He rapidly changed direction, almost losing his footing on loose gravel as he darted into the dim mouth of the alleyway.

"Gannon-" Boone sounded equally winded and furious. "-Gannon, will you just fucking _stop..."_

Arcade thought his heart was going to thud out of his chest in terror when a lucky snatch landed Boone a handful of Arcade's shirt, jerking him off balance and sending him reeling into the wall. His elbow took the brunt of his weight and he staggered into the brickwork, eyes watering hard enough to blur his vision as he instinctively clutched at his arm.

"Will you-" Boone braced a hand on his thigh as he sucked back great lungfuls of air, hauling back on Arcade's collar as he tensed up to run again, "-will you just stop? Just stop."

"Or what," said Arcade, his voice cracking slightly. "You'll shoot me?"

"Don't be stupid."

"I'm not being stupid. I'm _panicking_. There's a difference." He twisted out of Boone's grip and, before he could take more than a step, was neatly tripped by a nasty kick landing square and true at his ankle.

"Swear to god," said Boone, dragging his forearm across his face. "Why do you always have to make things so difficult?"

Arcade tried to get back to his feet, his ankle painful enough to leave him on bended knee. If anyone was to pass by and glimpse down the damp dark alley, he supposed they could be mistaken for thinking he was proposing to Boone. The thought made him feel ill.

"I'd make some remark about the irony of that statement, but I'm guessing you still don't know what irony _is_."

"I've managed so far without it." Boone stuck his hand out and, with a great deal of reluctance, Arcade took it, getting to his feet and limping to lean against the rough brick wall.

They stared at each other in uncomfortable silence. Arcade was tense, every muscle in his body coiled up like a spring and ready to flee. Out of all the scenarios passing through his over-active imagination, at no point had he predicted awkward silence. A pistol at the nape of his neck, yes. Standing in an alley and listening to the tinny strains of music drifting from down the street, no.

Boone broke the stalemate first, shrugging and muttering that Arcade looked well. The answer he received was short, sharp and unprintable. He just sighed and spread his hands, slowly turning on the spot.

"Unarmed," Boone said simply. "I swear."

Arcade remained resolutely mute.

"You left quickly," Boone said, and Arcade didn't know whether he meant the bar or Nevada. The laughter bubbling up from deep in his chest was faintly hysterical and he tamped it down hard.

"What do you want from me?" It was a blunt question and it deserved a blunt answer, but Boone just cracked his knuckles and avoided his eyes.

"You look good," he said again. "I'm not... I'm not here for you. Didn't know you were here." There was a long pause. "Thought you were dead."

"As much as it ruins your day, no. Still very much alive." The unspoken _no thanks to your help_ was telegraphed across Arcade's face. He discreetly tested his weight on his ankle, holding back a grimace as a warning spike of pain speared up.

"Listen, I'm..." Boone pressed his fingers to his temple, and something in Arcade flared up hot and irritable that he still recognised that as a sign that he was trying to form his thoughts into an orderly fact that he remembered anything about Boone at all was a ready source of personal annoyance.

"I'm not here for you or anything to do with, you know. Fugitives." Boone looked at Arcade sideways and waved his hand in a _you know_ gesture.

_Liar_, thought Arcade, and instead forced on a friendly expression and stuck out his hand in a show of friendship.

"To chance meetings," he said with a smile on his face and flint in his eyes.

He almost crowed when Boone, startled at the sudden change of mood, reached automatically to shake his hand. After all, ignoring learned physical responses never had been Boone's strong point.

It was almost too easy. A sharp yank at his arm to pull him off balance – _almost a dislocation, if only I'd had the leverage_ – and a hand slammed into his shoulder to spin him around. _Too easy, too easy_.  
Boone was slow to react, too slow to stop Arcade from clamping a devastatingly strong forearm across his neck. An unshakeable grip caught his flailing arm, wrenching it high between Boone's shoulder blades with an audible crunch of tendons slipping against bone.

Ten years of looking over your shoulder hardens a man up, and four footsore years slogging through the plains and trading medical services for protection from slavers and raiders makes a man even harder. He learned things, watched things, and after a while Arcade ceased to think of of it as fighting dirty and just fighting to win.

He tightened his grip and jerked his head to the side, a vicious headbutt missing its target and instead only issuing a glancing blow to Arcade's jaw. Boone's free hand scrabbled ineffectually at Arcade's arm, blunt nails scratching and slipping against sweating skin, and through a compressed throat he called Arcade every name under the sun.

"Will you-," he started, arching his back enough that Boone was dragged off the ground and effectively hung by the throat, his efforts to squirm and kick out at Arcade serving only to strangle himself further, "-will you calm down?"

He paused for a moment, his deliberate steady breathing overlaid by the wet rasp of Boone rapidly choking to the point of blackout. "That, by the way, is called _situational irony_. Just thought you should know."

A well-aimed kick to the knee was the only response he got.

Only after Arcade felt Boone weaken and go limp did he drop him, shoving him away with enough force to send the oxygen-starved smaller man stumbling into a wall. Boone rolled onto his hands and knees, the sudden dizzying intake of air leaving him noisily vomiting up a night of beer.

Arcade crouched at his shoulder, thinking of the knife left on his bedside table, the steel worn down to a razor sharp sliver after years of careful maintenance. Two weeks in the safety of a well guarded, relatively quiet town had made him sloppy and careless, and he only relaxed when his fingers chanced across a fist-sized piece of broken masonry.

"So," he said, carefully tucking the stone into his palm, sharpest side out, "Second and last time. Why are you here?"

"Nothing to do with you," choked out Boone, gulping back great mouthfuls of air in between retches. "I told you. Everyone thinks you're dead."

"And...?" prompted Arcade.

"And nothing." He sat up on his haunches, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "I'm a glorified bodyguard. I stand around in uniform and listen to some NCR econ egghead talk trade with the Mormons. Gannon. I'm not lying to you." His eyes flicked to the stone in Arcade's hand and, for probably the first time that Arcade could recall, Boone looked genuinely nervous.

_Good_, Arcade thought with more venom than he liked to think himself capable of. He got to his feet, the deep red-hot thrum of pain from his ankle being ignored as best he could. Boone watched the stone like a hawk and for a dark moment Arcade seriously considered striking him hard enough to knock him out.

Years ago he might' ve made a disarming comment, tying Boone into conversational knots before slipping into the darkness and fleeing. Time on the move had made him mean though, killed his idealism and ground off any soft edges. Now all Arcade could think of was protecting himself first, his mind filled with the all-encompassing desire to not let any unwanted intrusions of his past wrecking the comfortable niche he's made for himself. For himself, for John Hansen, either/or. If it took Boone spilling blood into a slick of his own vomit to buy some time, then so be it.

His grip tightened on the stone and Boone jerked backwards, backing himself square against the wall.

"Fuck, Gannon, I'm being serious." His hand strayed to his hip, the instinctive move of someone reaching for a weapon that wasn't there. "There's me and one other soldier, we're behind the sheriff's office. He's too green to know about the bounty lists. No Rangers in town either, not for another few weeks. I keep telling you, _everyone thinks you're dead."_


	3. Chapter 3

There hadn't been much more to it than that. A boot pressed hard on Boone's fingers had been an effective, albeit blunt, instrument of truth. When he'd clutched his hand to his chest and sworn up a blue streak, any attention snatched away by the real possibility of broken bones, Arcade had simply turned on his heel and left. He'd walked as steadily as he could in the wrong direction, doubling back along the train tracks before presenting himself at the southernmost gate to New Canaan itself, obediently letting the guards search him for drugs and weapons and smiling with an easy charm that gave away nothing of the screech of panic in his head.

When he'd finally reached his apartment he'd locked and relocked the door behind him, jamming a desk chair under the handle for good measure. It was an unpleasant night for Arcade, his nerves racing and the tinny taste of adrenaline hot under his tongue every time a floorboard creaked or a pipe settled. Eventually he gave up any pretence of sleep at all, kicking the sheets to his feet and reading the same chapter of a cheap cowboy novel over and over, reassured by the cool press of his knife nestled by his thigh.

* * *

Leaving the apartment the next morning had been difficult to the point of farce. He'd laced and unlaced his boots half a dozen times before his growling stomach forced his hand, and even then he'd hesitated at the door for a good long time. It'd taken a neighbour asking what the sam hill he was doing lurking in the hallway to finally convince himself to step out into the thin morning sun.

Now, safely holed up in the back of a dim _café_ and morosely picking at a rapidly cooling plate of eggs, Arcade took stock of the unexpected, unpleasant direction his life had suddenly taken.

Absolutely every shred of self-preservation instinct was telling him to run, run, run; haul out of New Canaan and speed towards the next watering stop north, then join a caravan or a merc troop and trade off medical services for escort high into Wyoming. Once he saw the signs of Great Khan settlements off to the east he'd be right to press on alone, hiking rough until he reached the rolling plains surrounding his adopted home town, and then... and then. He didn't know what he'd do after 'and then'. Spend another ten years scanning the road into town, getting twitchy every time a trade caravan rolled into town. Pack up and make his excuses and move on, maybe. Let everyone think he was dead, be a ghost.

Turning back north and west and joining the rapidly expanding lands of the Great Khans was one possibility, although the chances of running into someone he knew – or someone who knows someone who knew someone – from the Followers was a more than distinct possibility. If he went east, well, there was a sizeable Enclave base outside Chicago...

He cut off that line of thought before it really started, feeling disgusted for even contemplating the idea. _Truly a sign of how far I've sunk_, he thought dourly, drawing patterns in the silky slip of egg yolk with the edge of his fork. _Hello gents, I'm back to join the fold. I hear your scientist outfits are really something special. Where have I been for the past forty-six years? Best you don't ask._

Boone might've sworn on his mother's grave that he wasn't after Arcade, but it wasn't too much of a wild assumption to guess that the dollar value of a live Enclave bounty was only ratcheting higher and higher with every passing year. After all, rarity breeds value. He'd been worth two thousand clean NCR dollars when he'd first turned tail and ran and now, the paper dollar being worth something again, he guessed the dollar figure over his head would be double that. Triple even.

He swallowed and stared at the wall, turning his fork over and over between long fingers. People had gone back on their word before for much smaller amounts of money.

He'd always suspected Boone had something to do with Julie Farkas knowing about his dirty revelation of Enclave stock, even though she'd been tight lipped about exactly _how_ she'd known he was, as she so succinctly put it, suddenly 100% incompatible with the goals, ambitions and general everything-ness of the Followers.

If he'd been so ready to cut Arcade away based just on whose daddy belonged on which side of which war, well, maybe it wasn't also beyond Boone to merrily turn Arcade in for a little spare cash.

His head hurt just thinking about it.

Arcade knew couldn't leave New Canaan, not realistically. He'd been sent down with a stunning amount of caps packed into his duffel bag and a shopping list of the stocks needed to keep a rapidly growing family community fit and healthy, and it'd been mostly spent already. No one in New Canaan did anything without half paid up front, particularly when you were buying the services of experienced metalworkers and glass blowers. A thousand needle tips held in cork. A thousand glass syringe bodies, some recycled and some custom made. Petri dishes. Surgical spirit. A working autoclave. Linen and gauze from the fabric manufacturers outside Shady Sands, raw cotton traded from deep down south. Ready made Stimpacks and Med-X and the materials needed to make his own stocks, plus a little extra so Arcade could enlist some of the more experienced gardeners in town into attempting cultivation in such a high altitude. The list was endless and, personal urges to flee aside, he was bound to New Canaan until everything was ready to be loaded onto a truck and driven north.

_Responsibility_, he thought with a wan half-smile. _The crushing burden of responsibility. And to think half the town winked and told me not to enjoy myself too much in the big city_.

He pushed back his chair with a loud scrape across the tiled floor and paid for his meal, adding a slab of chewy flat bread and a pat of butter to his order as an afterthought. In a fit of largesse he treated himself to a jar of gooseberry jam from California, figuring that if he was going to spend the next week or two being completely paranoid and hiding in a small cramped apartment, he might as well fatten himself up a little.

* * *

His noble plans of hiding in his bolthole only lasted until that afternoon; disturbed when a runner from one of the goods manufacturers hammered at his door and presented him with a stack of invoices and an instruction to be at the offices at 10AM sharp, ready to inspect and sign off on the last of his orders.

"_You know where the workshop is, right?"_

"_End of 24th?"_

_"You got it, mister. Not as far as the train gates. Head past the meeting hall, ignore the NCR ring-ins, knock on the workshop doors and we'll come getcha."_

He'd ushered the teenager out with a promise to be there on time tomorrow and locked the door with slightly more force than he needed. Pressing his shoulder-blades hard into the flat wood of the door, Arcade had stared blankly at the opposite wall and let out a ragged breath he hadn't realised he was even holding.

If Arcade didn't actively try to persuade himself constantly that he was a better person than he actually thought himself to be, that would've been the point where he dragged the bulging dufflebag of caps out from under his bed, laced up his boots and hitched a ride with the first caravan pushing east without even a token glance backwards.

But, as he reminded himself over and over again, that's not what good people do. Not when they're trusted by a town of good people, a town of good people who didn't pry too hard and warmly accepted him when he'd fallen madly in love with one of their own, who trusted him with what was easily their profits for a year.

_John Hansen is a good person even if I'm not._ Arcade thumbed off his glasses, dangling the cheap wire frames from an already bent arm as he pinched the bridge of his nose, already painfully aware of a stress headache gathering behind his temples. _I should write that on the mirror. Remind myself every time I'm brushing my teeth not to leave another trail of wrecked hearts and angry people behind me. To do today: don't be terrible._

For the want of anything better to do he ran a bath and sat in lukewarm water until his fingers pruned, chewing a strip of white willow into pulpy nothingness and half-heartedly reading another chapter in his dog-eared paperback. It maybe wasn't the most exciting potential last night of freedom anyone has ever experienced, but it kept him from guiltily glancing at the heavy canvas bag under the bed and wondering how it'd take to cross the unforgiving dustbowl of the Midwest.


End file.
